Maya Angelou Read online

  According to Alice Walker, a womanist is willful, in the sense of indicating a positive expression of the black female self. In Gather Together Maya shows strong evidence of being willful. From her initial decision to leave her mother to her final decision to return to her, Maya acts in a self-determined way. At times she fantasizes about being married and protected, but she rejects these dreams as unrealistic. For the most part, she directs her own course of events. She willfully disrupts a prizefight when a friend is beaten, knowing she will lose her job. She willfully challenges the salesgirl in Stamps who blocks her way, knowing she may lose her grandmother’s affection. She willfully decides to give up all thoughts of heroin after she witnesses Troubadour’s undoing, knowing that if she doesn’t she may lose her life. In her willfulness, Maya at eighteen is a forerunner of Walker’s iconic womanist: “Responsible. In charge. Serious” (1967, xi, Walker’s emphasis).

  Chapter 5

  Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976)

  When Angelou’s second volume, Gather Together in My Name, reached its conclusion, Maya, luckily released from a life of drug addiction and prostitution, vowed to maintain her innocence. In the following volume, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, Maya, now in her early twenties, displays a sense of self-rejection that negates the more positive ending of Gather Together. She’s too tall, too skinny. Her teeth stick out. Her hair is “kinked” (4). She is distrustful of people who show an interest in her. How similar this portrait is to the beginning of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, where she believes herself to be ugly and deplores her ruffled purple dress. The description is also reminiscent of negative self-images in other autobiographies by African American women, for example, in the early pages of Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), or in the racial confusion experienced by bell hooks when her parents gave her white dolls when she longed for “unwanted, unloved brown dolls covered in dust” (1996, 24).

  For the lonely Maya, the major escape is contemporary music. She frequently visits a record store on Fillmore Street in Los Angeles, a place with turntables and stalls for listening to the newest records. Here she is befriended by a white woman, Louise Cox, who offers the suspicious Maya a job. Here she meets her first husband, Tosh Angelos.

  Throughout this troubled autobiography, Angelou’s emotions are focused on her son, Guy. She marries Tosh Angelos, in part to please her son. But the marriage is not workable and ends in divorce. Maya is once again a single mother—once again the person responsible for Guy’s needs, his well-being, his survival. Her achievements and failures as a mother-identified woman conflict with her aspirations for a career. These antagonisms form a pattern of tensions in this, Angelou’s most complex volume.

  Angelou’s conflicts are concentrated in three basic areas: her marriage; her responsibilities as a mother, daughter, and granddaughter; and her desire to experience the joy of her self. Two incidents in particular contribute to the feelings of dissatisfaction that permeate the book. One is the death of Maya’s beloved grandmother, Momma Henderson; the other is Angelou’s characterization of herself as someone out of tune, someone whose confusion over priorities leads her to certain regrettable errors in judgment. In the final scene, set in Hawaii, these uncertainties are partially resolved.

  Narrative Point of View

  Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas marks a historical moment in the history of African American autobiography. At this time, no other well-known black female autobiographer had taken her story into a third volume. Maya Angelou’s decision to keep going affects point of view, for there is now a narrator who is telling her life story in three distinct but connected segments, each linked to the other by the changing central character and by the first-person point of view. In extending her story into a third frame, Angelou deviates from the more contained autobiographical pattern, which tends to begin in a moment of revelation and to end at some decisive moment in the autobiographer’s life, as in Black Elk Speaks (1932), which begins in boyhood and ends in the emptiness of reservation life following the 1890 massacre of the Sioux nation at Wounded Knee. Black Elk’s story has a strong sense of tradition; the narrator relies on established cultural myths and dream figures, using repetition in order to affirm the importance of Native American life. Singin’ and Swingin’ lacks this kind of assured uniformity.

  During our interview Angelou seemed very concerned that her serial autobiography would not result in repetition: “Somehow, if one thing tells the truth and were able to say it, then that thing is enough. You don’t have to tell it again and again. If you’ve told it so delicious that it seeped in by osmosis, then you’ve done it” (“Icon” 1997). Osmosis is defined as a process in which a fluid passes through a cell wall or some other lining, leading to a spreading or diffusion of liquids. For Angelou to use that concept to explain the writing process, especially when she needs to structure multiple volumes of material, seems to indicate a lack of control. Later in the interview she did acknowledge the need to consciously repeat certain material: “Some things which are repetitive can be boring and really not serve you well. Some things, on the other hand, which seem to make the point again, if they are extended or if another color is put in, are okay because that does drive the point” (“Icon” 1997).

  Angelou’s third installment reveals her good traits while also exposing her weak ones, so that what emerges is the familiar narrator who has become more dynamic, more open. Her use of flashbacks and flashforwards enables her to move up and down the narrative scale, for instance, when she recalls Momma Henderson selling meat pies to workers or Vivian Baxter making good money as she “ran businesses and men with autocratic power” (11). Both recollections extend the point of view from an individual to a collective one; it is not only Angelou’s pride that is at stake, it is the family’s. The Baxters and Johnsons exercised “unlimited authority” in their financial affairs (10), to the point that welfare is not a job alternative. The narrator’s memories of her enterprising family members serve as connective threads, helping to create a sense of unity among the individual volumes of the series.

  Structure and Setting

  Throughout this work structure is defined as an arrangement of the story according to the motif of movement or travel, while setting is the number of locations where specific events unfold. The first two volumes occupy a varied American setting represented by Arkansas, Missouri, and California. In Singin’ and Swingin’ the setting breaks open, shifting from its American focus to include a European location. The expanded setting continues throughout the remaining autobiographies: volume 4, The Heart of a Woman, takes place in California, New York, Europe, and Egypt; volume 5, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, ends in West Africa and anticipates Angelou’s return to America, volume 6 marks her return to New York, then to San Francisco, to Hawaii, to California, and back to New York.

  The movement from one journey to another establishes the narrative form, both in the single volume and in the series as a whole, with interconnected routes denoting places where action occurs. Angelou’s autobiographies are informed not only by her experiments in structure but also by her journey into Asian, African, and African American literature. In her view, anyone who emerges from the journey of life is an autobiographer. She thus draws all of God’s children into her encompassing definition of what makes an autobiographer: “Each one is an autobiographer…. So I think we’re all on journeys, according to how we’re able to travel, overcome, undercome, and share what we have learned” (“Icon” 1997). The scattered adventures into song, dance, and men that give Gather Together in My Name its chaotic structure are more organized and tightened up in Singin’ and Swingin’, where the most sustained journey is Angelou’s European adventure.

  In 1954, Maya becomes the lead dancer with the touring company of Porgy and Bess. Her extensive coverage of the tour, which accounts for about 40 percent of the third volume, indicates how very import
ant it was to her life. On the European tour, Angelou carefully details the course of travel, dividing the journey into subgroups: the plane to Milan, the bus from the Milan airport, the fast train or Blue Train from Venice to Paris, the astounded crowd preventing her movement in Yugoslavia, and so forth. In recording her momentous journey, Angelou’s point of view is that of an aware and articulate black woman who does not hesitate to make racial generalizations. Angelou is quite conscious, for instance, of the white personnel in European hotels and of how they react to the lively African American cast. She listens to a wealthy white French woman, who remarks that West Africans living in Paris are hated but black Americans are not. She notices that Italians tend to approve of black Americans but not white ones (147). Her observations of race, gender, and class, along with the personality that she brings to every situation, prevent Singin’ and Swingin’ from becoming a travel narrative.

  The author illustrated her theme of the journey when she alluded to the tortured condition of her friend and burn-victim Betty Shabazz, whose doctors could not understand her phenomenal fight against death. We need to learn from her struggle, Angelou commented about the widow of Malcolm X: “But there’s something about the journey, the onerous climb. It may be part of the lesson to learn. I imagine that each of us is on a journey” (“Icon” 1997).

  So varied a set of journeys helps create the sense of flux or change in the series. Imagine that Maya had stayed in Stamps, Arkansas, for her entire life, had gotten a job as a school teacher, and had married the manager of the lumber mill. Although there might still be an autobiography as intense as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, it would have ended there and would not have become a series, a structure that is dependent on changes in setting, values, and culture.

  Plot Development

  The plot of Singin’ and Swingin’ is not a progressive action from beginning to end, like the plot of a standard novel, but rather a sequence of conflicts or oppositions that emerge, recede, and often disappear from the text, only to be revived pages later in a different form.

  The construction of the plot of Angelou’s third autobiography is best described as the effective placement of opposing incidents and attitudes. Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas explores a variety of issues affecting Angelou’s life—motherhood, making a living, being a wife, being a grandchild. In almost every instance Angelou’s attitude toward these and other issues is ambivalent, what some people call the “Yes, But Syndrome” and others the “Affirmation/Denial Syndrome.”

  At the beginning of the volume, Angelou is in her twenties, struggling to provide herself and her son with fundamental needs but unwilling to go on welfare. She is offered a job selling records. At the shop she meets a Greek sailor whose knowledge of black music is equal to her own. She wants to marry him, but she is suspicious. He is white but he is also Greek. She marries him but there are conflicts. They divorce.

  Angelou’s great love is for her son Guy, but she also needs a chance for her career to grow. She leaves Guy with her mother, Vivian Baxter, and dances in Europe, Yugoslavia, and Egypt. But while she is overseas she always misses her son. Vivian tells Maya that she has taken a job as a dealer in Las Vegas and that there’s no one to care for Guy. Maya leaves the tour, giving one month’s notice, although she wants to stay. At the end she is reunited with her son, but he is sick. They go to Hawaii together. The story is finished.

  This skeletal summary of the plot demonstrates how the patterns of affirmation and denial protrude from the flesh of the autobiography, advancing the plot while at the same time retarding it. The pattern of “yes, buts” or denials is the bare bones of the plot. Once the reader recognizes what Angelou is doing, sometimes with awareness, sometimes not, he or she will gain a new appreciation for her dialectical method—a critical term to indicate a construction or arrangement based on a conflict of opposites. This dialectic is particularly relevant to the characterization of black motherhood, introduced in the childhood narrative but finding its fullest expression in Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas.

  Character Development

  The term conflict of opposites appropriately describes the character development in Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas. Character development in a standard, single-volume autobiography reflects a clear and consistent pattern of behavior that shows growth and change in the narrator from the beginning until the conclusion. In Angelou’s extended series, however, the central character, rather than being a self-directed autobiographer, frequently demonstrates qualities of self-negation/self-acceptance as she vacillates back and forth between denying and accepting herself. This wavering of character from one volume to another is most extreme in Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, where Maya’s personality is often ambiguous—uncertain, indefinite, and unsettled. And yet, it is because of these negative characteristics that Angelou engages readers in the awesome reality of her personality. She is a woman who dramatically demonstrates that the self-conscious narrator can be aware of her mistakes.

  In the construction of an autobiography, character and plot are almost inseparable. The character of the narrator is married to the plot as decisions are made or postponed, unions are done or undone, and children are sent away or kept at one’s side. Both Angelou and the other characters in Singin’ and Swingin’ often surmount the oppositional forces that divide them. Indeed, there are moments of exhilaration. But even her great success in Singin’ and Swingin’, the Porgy and Bess tour, for example, has its down side.

  The elation implied in the title is contradicted by other, discordant experiences that play for and against each other in the formation of Angelou’s character. Confused and uncentered, she is forced to make a number of choices concerning her mothering, her profession, and her sexuality. Her character develops as she confronts these choices, which involve the people she is closest to: her son, her grandmother, her mother, her brother, her husband, herself.

  The first significant circumstance affecting her character is her relationship with Tosh Angelos. Maya meets her husband-to-be early in the third autobiography. Impressed by the young sailor’s enthusiasm for jazz, she introduces him to Guy, who is immediately won over. Vivian Baxter is not. She warns Maya against marrying Tosh because he is a “poor white man” (24). Maya, though, evades that problem by telling herself that Tosh is really Greek, not white.

  The marriage is initially satisfying, but eventually Maya begins to resent Tosh’s demands that she stay at home and be the perfect housewife, the provider of suitable meals and “fabulous jello desserts” (26). She is also bothered by what she senses as disapproval from her friends because of the interracial marriage. As Tosh takes greater control of her life, Maya, who “mistakes prison for security,” does little to challenge his authority (McPherson 1990, 83).

  The conflict between Maya and Tosh centers on two issues: gender roles and religion. When Tosh tells Guy that there is no God, Maya is furious. She reacts by secretly visiting black churches, searching for the faith she left behind in Stamps with Momma Henderson. She is also looking for a way to get back at Tosh. Her quest ends in her conversion at the Evening Star Baptist Church, in one of the first great celebrations of African American culture in the series. The shouts, gospels, spirituals, “polyrhythmic” clapping of hands all converge on Angelou “like sweet oil” as she shakes with elation (28).

  The religious transformation, like the marriage, is short-lived. The differences between Maya and Tosh grow until one day he says he’s “tired of being married” (37). In a quiet rage that lasts for several pages, Maya ponders the issue of race, fantasizing that Tosh is a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Using her sexuality as revenge, she goes to a bar, gets smashed, and spends the night with an older man, knowing that Guy will be safe with his stepfather. When she returns home her attitude toward Tosh has changed. She is no longer the perfect housewife, cook, or cooperative lover. Maya loses her affection for him,
and the marriage of nearly three years collapses.

  The second struggle that strongly influences her character is the conflict within the family: between Maya and her son Guy; between Maya and her mother; between Maya and her paternal grandmother. The mother/son conflict is intensified by Maya’s guilt over not being a responsible mother. Social standards determine that a good mother is faithful and ever-caring. Social standards dictate that a good mother is one who sacrifices her own happiness for that of her child, who makes no move that disrupts her child’s friendships or schooling.

  The complicated issue of motherhood is a unifying but also a disruptive theme throughout the series and one that receives its own treatment in the Thematic Issues section of this chapter. In terms of character development, the mother/child opposition is an essential aspect of Angelou’s growth. She said in an interview that “the absolutely greatest thing that happened to me was my son, because I had to grow and learn not to smother him” (Toppman 1989, 144). She seems to be searching for the right balance: neither smothering nor slighting him. Because of her year’s absence from Guy, Maya suffers during the primary action of the volume, the company tour of Porgy and Bess. When the tour is over, Maya makes a vow to her son never to leave him again. On that promise the book ends.

  Maya’s relationship with her mother, Vivian Baxter, takes on new dimensions in Singin’ and Swingin’. Recall that at the end of Gather Together in My Name, Maya had returned to Vivian and Daddy Clidell for comfort, love, and lodging. When the subsequent volume, Singin’ and Swingin’, opens, Maya is living an impoverished but independent life. She and Guy again return to the protection of her mother and stepfather’s house on the condition that Maya pays a fair share of the expenses. Although happy with this arrangement, she is forced to retract it when, against Vivian’s advice, she marries Tosh.